For thousands of years the planet's oceans have provided us with food and resources, and allowed explorers to travel to the farthest reaches of the Earth. But they also present vast unknown depths - according to Oceana, an organisation for the protection of the world's oceans, some 80 percent of the sea remains unexplored. So it's little wonder that throughout history many people have asked themselves, what is it that lies just beneath the surface? Doubtless it was these primal fears that led sailors to entertain each other with eerie tales of sea monsters, ghost ships and other mysterious things that lurked beneath the waves or just over the horizon. From the legendary demon of the deep Davy Jones to malicious mermaids who weren't so little, we dive into the origins of the myths and legends associated with the deep blue sea.
MERMAIDS
Some of the most famous sea creatures who continue to endure in popular culture are mermaids, supernatural entities with the top half of an adult human female and the tail of a fish. "They go way bade,'' Vaughn Scribner, author of (Realction, 2020) tells us. "The Akkadians around 5000 BCE are worshipping basically gods that are half man, half fish. The Babylonians depict them as well." However, Scribner states, for a historian it is sometimes difficult to discern which ancient entities can be deemed to have influenced the development the mermaid myth, and which have not. "The Greeks have Scylla, but this is where things get murky," there are the sirens," Scribner continues, "but they were flying creatures. They weren't in the ocean. How we get to our modern representation of mermaids is very, very murky."
